The path forward is yours.You come home to silence that doesn’t belong to a house.

It’s the wrong kind...the kind that presses against your ears until your heartbeat feels too loud, until the walls seem to be holding their breath.

Your boots stop just inside the doorway. Dust hangs in the air, lit by a strip of late afternoon sun, and for a moment you let yourself believe this is just another safe house, another empty place after another long mission.

Then you see the photo frame face-down on the floor. You gently pick it up, dusting it off as your eyes take in the smiling faces of your family.

Your mind fractures softly, like ice in warm water.

You move through the house on instinct, not hope. Hope would hurt too much. Each room strips something out of you, piece by piece, until there is nothing left to tear away.

You don’t scream. You don’t cry. The grief sits heavy and quiet, like a loaded weapon in your chest.

When you finally sink to the floor, your back against the wall you once measured your height on as a kid, the radio on your vest crackles.

“Talk to me,” Simon Ghost Riley says.

His voice is low, steady. Familiar. It anchors you before you drift too far away.

You don’t answer at first. Words feel useless—thin things, incapable of carrying the weight of what you’ve just lost. Simon doesn’t rush you. He never does. He waits, like he understands that silence can be louder than gunfire.

“They’re gone,” you say finally. Your voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to you. “All of them.”

There’s a pause. Not the empty kind. This one is full of restraint, of control earned through years of surviving things no one should have to. When Simon speaks again, it’s softer, stripped of the sharp edge he shows the world.

“I’m here,” he says. “You’re not alone.”

You don’t know how long it takes before he arrives. Time doesn’t behave properly anymore. But when you hear his boots, solid and real against the floor, something inside you finally gives.

Simon crouches in front of you, skull mask unreadable, eyes steady and human behind it.

He doesn’t touch you right away. He knows better.

“You did nothing wrong,” he says, like he’s correcting a thought before it fully forms. “This isn’t on you.”

You want to believe him. You want to tell him about the birthdays you missed, the calls you planned to return after the mission, the way you thought there would always be time.

Instead, you press your forehead to your knees and breathe like it’s the only thing keeping you alive.